A fun night out

Last night we stepped of our comfort zone (which is: staying quietly at home on a Friday night and going to bed at a usual time). Instead, on the eve of our 28th wedding anniversary, we went out on a Friday night and had fun. 

Start of the women's 200m.

It's five years since the Tokyo Olympics were supposed to happen and four years since they did and we sat at home in Tokyo watching events happen in our own city that we had had tickets for! Last night we went to the National Stadium (the main Olympic stadium—22 km from our place) to watch a session of the World Athletics Championships.

It was a lot of fun. I feared that part of it might be slow, but they kept us entertained for five hours! I only left my seat once. At times it was hard to know where to look. At one point there was women's javelin, women's decathlon shot put (both of which were down our end of the stadium) and some 800m and 5,000m races all happening at the same time, during which the male triple jumpers were also warming up. So much going on and so impressively organised. I love going to orchestral concerts because they are visually an absolute feast, and this was the same, so many things to watch.

When you are at an event like this in person there are so many things you can see that don't get shown on TV, like how they get the javelins and shots back to the athletes (remote cars for the former and a ramp for the latter). There was also a cool dude on a motorised unicycle on the track taking video of the runners in the back straight (the video you'll be seeing on TV). The choreography that went into putting out and removing the hurdles was also impressive.

The weather was also gorgeous. Finally the fiercely hot and humid Tokyo summer is in the past and we've entered into delightful early autumn. It was neither hot nor cold last night, even as we walked home at midnight.

A lot of the 58,000 people in the stadium were Japanese; you could tell that merely from the noise when their athletes were introduced or competing. We discovered that the reigning female World Champion in javelin is Japanese and we watched her strive last night to qualify for the finals in the competition to defend her crown. She didn't qualify, unfortunately, but she was well cheered for by the crowd.

This was early in the evening when 
the stands weren't so full, by the end
of the session at 10.30 there weren't
many spare seats near us.

But it was an international event and there were many foreigners too. Many more than we are used to seeing. Later, when we got on a train to go home, I watched a Japanese guy, probably on his way home from a work event, look in amazement at the large influx of people onto his train, many of whom were talking (not something common on trains), and not all in Japanese. He was sitting in front of where I was standing and craning his neck to see if he could tell which station we'd all gotten on at (he'd probably been napping). 

I'd not been looking forward to the trip home. I've had some very uncomfortable, overly crowded experiences late at night on Tokyo trains (and some not so great ones getting home from sporting events in Brisbane too). This wasn't so bad, though getting out of the stadium was a tad confusing, when the route we'd taken to get in was closed. The staff redirected us along different routes, largely by shouting at us in Japanese through hand-held speaker horns. But once we found the station, it was okay and many passengers got off our train fairly quickly and I ended up having a seat for much of the trip home, which was a good thing because I was definitely drooping at 11.45 on a Friday night!

Enjoying where we live

Despite having lived here for 20 years I think it's only just dawning on me that I live in this nation's capital! And that a lot of cool international-type things happen here. To those who see Japan as a travel destination, a place to see the sights and do the fun things, it might seem weird. But we live in Japan, we're not on holidays here and, like most people in the place they live, we don't do much tourism. 

And also, when we first arrived in Tokyo we had three boys under seven, and for a long time we just hunkered down and did what needed to be done. Rarely did we venture out to events that weren't part of our immediate circle. We didn't have the energy to go to events or take the family out for travel adventures. Most of our outings were, in the early years, to parks, and later (since 2010), many of our Saturdays were consumed by interschool sport.

But on the other hand, some people might also find it weird that missionaries do any tourism at all. Before we came to Japan we were given some excellent advice about missionary life. We were told to try to be as present as you can, where you are; to enjoy things you couldn't do elsewhere. That doesn't mean we love everything about Japan and only eat Japanese food, but it does mean that we'll happily enjoy an international event like the World Athletics Championships when they come to town. By the way, it also means that we rarely eat Japanese food in Australia, and we do our best to enjoy being present in Australia too.

We'd also been advised by a psychologist, as we approached having all our kids leave home, that we should spend more time enjoying ourselves! We're a pretty good team, but fun hasn't always been easy to do. I'd like to think that we've made some progress on that front in the last couple of years. And last night surely qualifies!

This week is unusual

Tomorrow we are catching trains to our first in-person overnight mission conference in four years. It's 550km north of here, but we get to go on the super-fast Shinkansen, so it's a shorter journey than if we were driving. 

OMF Japan field has usually held all-field conferences every two or three years. We were about to gather in March 2020 when all plans had to be cancelled for the pandemic. Since then we’ve had two online substitutes, but they really have only been “better than nothing” events.

This is the grand dining room of the venue of
our last all-field conference, in 2018.

One of the best things about on-field conferences is actually gathering with other missionaries. It really is pretty exhausting, because not only do you have various meetings and gatherings to attend, you spend a lot of the “free time”, coffee breaks, and meals catching up with people you haven’t seen in a long time, but it's a "good" exhausted. This is our family-away-from-home. The noise is quite something! I think this one is going to be more overwhelming for me than they have in the past, because rarely, in the last 2 ½ years, have I been in a room with more than 20 people who are talking to one another.

Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to gathering with our “OMF Family” in May for the first time in four years. (Incidentally it will be first time in Japan that we've been to a conference without any kids—our boys are staying home.) This isn’t a full-field conference, but about two-thirds of our missionaries will be there. There will be many new faces, and, sadly, many faces missing—people who’ve retired or left the field for various reasons, as well as most of those who don't work on Honshu. It's going to be an all-masked affair, and I'm hoping that wearing masks all the time will not hinder our time together.

I don't get off with being just a participant, either. I'm running a writing workshop for an handful of people on Friday afternoon and playing the piano for a short while during communion also. But I'm okay with these! What I have had trouble with is actually believing that this is going to happen. We've had so many plans cancelled in the last 2 ½ yrs, it seems surreal to actually have something big like this really happening. And we've done our Covid tests, so we're really good to go! I'm packing my suitcase soon.

By the way, if you're interested, this was my blogpost after our last conference, in March 2018: https://mmuser.blogspot.com/2018/03/hokkaido-conference-is-wrap.html This time we're going to a much more bare-bones venue, a youth hostel.

Lining up ducks

I haven’t written a blog post yet this week, mostly because it’s been a busy week away from my desk. Actually a very different looking week to what most of the year has looked like. I spent a lot of the week with other people! All day Monday I spent at a prayer meeting with other OMF missionaries. And travelling across the city in peak hour on trains to get there and back (total about three hours travel and six trains). It was something I hadn’t been looking forward to. Last year when I did this long day I ended up with a nasty headache and actually fairly distressed at wearing a mask (the pressure on my nose and ears when I have a headache is close to unbearable). However I’m more used to wearing masks now and I didn’t end up with the worst of headaches, so it wasn’t so bad.

Tuesday morning I did a quick couple of hours catching up on urgent computer tasks and email before replenishing the larder with a grocery shop and then shooting off downtown again. This time I spent the afternoon packing the latest issue of the magazine that I play a significant part in publishing.

Wednesday was a cold, rainy day, so I was glad I got to stay home and work at my desk. I made good progress that I was able to continue into Thursday morning. Then Thursday afternoon was consumed with online work meetings, specifically about planning for the weeks ahead, which are less-than-straightforward weeks. More about that later.

Friday morning I spent at a school prayer meeting and then a couple of hours with small fellowship group in a restaurant. Friday afternoon was another shopping trip and then seeing what I could salvage from the rest of the day at my desk, but a headache caught up with me and I didn’t last too long there.

In the middle of that has been a few other things:

• 
  Fudge making: last year I raised some money for the school by making and selling fudge to staff and local friends. I’m doing it again this year. I’ve made it a little easier by using a silicon mold, which means that the size of the pieces is much more consistent. So in between other things, I’ve been making fudge this week.

• Wrestling: our youngest (16 y.o.) has rejoined the wrestling team this year. Last week they had their first meet, a small affair between two schools. It was weird to be back in person at a sporting event, but also great. Unfortunately he got injured in his first match and hasn’t been able to get back into training this week while he recovers. But we did watch the rest of the team via a live video link on Thursday night.
• 
  Cricket: cricket fans that we are, we’ve been enjoying live cricket this week for the first time in several months. The English team is in Australia at the moment. The two countries are playing the famous Ashes series. We’ve been able to subscribe to the series (that has rarely been possible in the years we’ve been overseas) and it’s fun. Alas, most of the play happened during our work hours this week so we haven’t seen much, but it’s been fun, another interest David and I share.

• I also passed 100 books read for the year (I also started more than 20 more, but for one reason or another they ended up in the "I don't want to finish reading" list). I've got more than a dozen lined up for the next few weeks, I wonder how many of those I'll get read?

Monday and Friday would have looked quite different during most of 2021. I’m so grateful that, for the moment at least, we’re not living under so many restrictions. It’s weird to look at the cricket and see crowds of people without masks on, though. Masks are still being worn by 99.9% of people in public here.

The coming weeks are a mixture of relaxation and business. This time next week we’ll be up in the mountains taking a week’s holiday. Our traditional pre-Christmas holiday. With school on a three-week break, I anticipate that I’ll be taking things a little slower after Christmas also. Certainly we won’t be getting up at 6am.

In January I’m helping facilitate the same OMF course I helped with last year. This year it’s still online, but we’ve changed a few things so that hopefully it will be a little less arduous. However, I haven’t completely stepped away from my social media job, so I’ll be juggling a few more balls than I did last year. Plus, there's a variety of wrestling events on in January and February. We'll see how well I come out of that busy season. I didn't cope very well in January/February this year, but part of that was an unexpected and traumatic loss in mid-February.

Meanwhile, I prepare as best I can for what's to come. First of all is getting my "ducks lined up" so I can go away and not check email or open my computer for a week. Ah...the bliss. I've got fruit mince pies to make and books to read!

How's your December looked so far?

Crowded trains: more complex than you imagine

These last nine days my husband has again been in hospital. He had surgery last Wednesday for a skin graft over the area that they excised due to suspect skin cancer in September. His hospital is in Shinjuku, one of Tokyo's main city centres.

I've visited on five occasions so far, the final time will be tomorrow when he's (hopefully) discharged. The journey is an hour via two to four trains—often standing—and involves numerous flights of stairs and walking about 1.5 km. I love going to see him, but the journey really takes it out of me. 

Most of the trains I've been on have been okay, but on Monday I stayed for dinner and came home around 7.30pm. The first train I hopped on was not a fun experience. 

My first clue it was going to be difficult was when the train arrived and no one got off. It already looked full. But people in the line in front of me literally pushed their way in and I had little choice but to push in too (the next train was unlikely to be less crowded). The lady in this photo could have been me. I had to check to make sure neither of the bags I was carrying were protruding into the space where the door was going to shut.

But that was only the start of the "fun". Standing jammed in like that is technically fine as long as either:

1. the people getting out at the next stop are next to the doors, or 

2. everyone is getting out at the same stop.

But that is rarely the case in an inner-city line where there are lots of intersecting train lines (it was a different experience I described here when I headed into the city from the suburbs and almost everyone was headed for the end of the line in the city). So at the next stop I got "spewed" out onto the platform while the train disgorged itself of people who were buried deep inside and needed to exit. 

Then we repeated the previous action of pushing our way back on, except that this time I got to be buried deeper inside. Which is not necessarily better. 

Thankfully, though I am only 157cm high, Japanese people aren't as tall as Australians on average, and I usually get some air, but still, being jammed such as your body is touching four or five other people is not fun. You can end up in very awkward situations. I've had my hands jammed to my sides, so I couldn't reach my face, been stuck behind a lady whose long hair swept over my face and tickled my nose, and most commonly, had someone's elbow or shoulder or hip pocking into me. I am thankful that I've never experienced wandering hands, but in a situation like this, it does not surprise me that women are harassed.

Here is a photo I took the other day at a quiet moment on my way into the hospital mid-afternoon. This is the standard layout of seats on a Tokyo commuter train. In a crowded train there is usually three lines of people standing down the middle between the people sitting down and then a tonne squeezed into that small area near the door. That's where I got stuck on Monday.

The aforementioned cycle of "shoving into the train—travelling one station—people disgorging—people pushing back on the train" happened eight times in my journey of 16 minutes. I only got pushed out onto the platform once, but it was a great relief to get off the train finally and change lines to a train where I wasn't squished up against strangers nor having strangers pushed past me or pushing me so they could get onto the train. For a nation that can be characterised by generally "no touching" and "not being a bother to others", this pushing-shoving experience is quite strange.

It is all quite quiet too. Quiet enough for me to hear someone exclaim, "There's a foreigner here" when I first got on.

The other strange thing about it is how orderly this is (there are even arrows in the stations to help modulate the flow of foot traffic). Lining up, pushing on, jiggling around so we all fit, pushing off again. There's generally a quiet sense of order and no rudeness (though I have experienced rudeness beyond the general shoving required). Certainly being aware of people around you and doing your best not to take up more space than you have to is part of it. It is routine for people to wear backpacks on their fronts to take up less room.

What's interesting to note is that the culture of orderliness and taking care of others as best they can in such crowded situations on trains has spilled over into the use of elevators. My husband is in a 19-floor hospital and the elevators are very busy. They aren't as crowded as trains, but we've seen the same practice of people close to the door hopping off the elevator if someone behind them needs to exit.

Needless to say, I am glad that I don't have to commute every day in conditions like these. I will also be very happy to have my husband home again and not have to visit him in hospital again soon!

Giving blood, typhoons, and a cross country meet

None of these things are related, but constitute notable or interesting things that happened in the last week. Much more interesting to write about than the 30+ emails that I've written today as well as numerous editing and social media scheduling decisions I've made.

Giving blood

The blood donation centre is on prime real estate, looking
down over an intersection in the city centre that I've
crossed many times.

On my way back from Osaka last Tuesday I stopped at Ikebukuro (the nearest "big city centre" to us). They have have a permanent Red Cross blood donation centre there that I'd been intending to visit for some years. Periodically the Red Cross has been invited by CAJ to set up a temporary clinic at a CAJ event and I've donated a couple of times there. However, as donation was something I didn't find hard to bear, it seemed that I could do better than that. 

I've been a blood donor since I was 17 when I volunteered to go with a school group to get signed up. However, between "frequently" changing countries, learning Japanese, having under-school aged kids at home for ten years, and ill-timed illness (I was refused twice for medical reasons in recent years when I had the opportunity to give), I've rarely given in the last 20 or so years. It was time!

I have to say it was a satisfying experience. Not only did I negotiate this new non-English environment on my own, I felt like I was giving a tiny bit back to a country that has hosted me for so many years. Satisfying. Oh, and they have a cool vending machine which meant I got as many free drinks as I wanted, plus free biscuits and ice cream at the end!

Cross country meet
We've been going to cross country meets in Tokyo since 2010 when our eldest son first joined the CAJ cross country team. It seems a terribly normal part of September and October. Last Friday when I questioned the sanity of choosing to get up at 5 the next morning to accompany the team, I quickly dismissed the question. It's simply "what we do", no point questioning it. Our middle son is in the team and our youngest is a "team manager", the latter which is basically "coach's assistant".

I was happy when I got there: the venue is amazing, and I've shown it to you before (see here for just one of my posts). It's probably as close to seeing what "natural" Tokyo used to look like as you'll find.

A portion of the course that I walked. It all looks very similar to this.

This is such a tradition for us that I missed some "old faces" of other parents. Either their kids have graduated or they are on home assignment or not in the team this year for one reason or another. David wasn't even there this time as the school had need of a driver for the middle school soccer team and he was the only one available. So I busied myself with walking along the course when I wasn't helping "newbie" parents understand what was going on. (It helps to know that there are places you can walk to during the races to see the kids part-way through the race.) I managed to walk about 5 km through this beautiful forest.

Typhoon
Then on Sunday we had a typhoon set its "sights" on us. We watched it all day (an oppressively hot and humid day) and it finally started raining around 7pm and continued through the night. It was a noisy night as the rain pelted and wind blew. It was also hot as we usually rely on our open windows to cool our un-airconditioned bedrooms down just a little.

But we didn't cop the worst of it. Chiba (the prefecture to the east of Tokyo) did and they are still restoring power there today. Chiba is where Narita, one of Tokyo's two international airports, is located. It seems as though things didn't go so well there because public transport shut down, especially the trains, and many thousands got stranded at the airport.

Our monthly OMF prayer meeting on the other side of Tokyo (in Chiba) was scheduled to start at 9.30 yesterday, but the trains were all off schedule, and that left millions in quite a mess trying to get anywhere (not an exaggeration, from the statistics I can find, approximately 40 million train journeys are undertaken in Tokyo every day). So, with little damage in our area, the concern for getting to the meeting was about how crowded the trains would be and if they were running at all. I deliberately set out late and took a different route to usual and made it there fine (if a bit hot and bothered as it was very hot and I ended up at a station 1.4km from our HQ). Some people intending to come never made it, purely because of train problems.

There were thousands without power yesterday and even this morning. A colleague's son got to skip school for a second day running because power was yet to be restored to the school. That sounds lovely, until you realise that many were without power to keep them cool in the mid-30˚C temperatures.

The rest of my week is not shaping up to be anything nearly as exciting as any of the above, though we do have another early rise on Saturday for cross country.

Some joys and struggles of the last 10 days

I've been busy this last week since I last wrote. Here's what's been going on in my on the edge of ordinary life:

But first a photo. Plum blossoms are just coming out. Next week the
Cherry blossoms are forecast to show themselves in Tokyo. Spring
is taking off and it's wonderful!

Monday 4th I did my usual grocery run and spent some time at the gym too. Aside from that, it was a home office day as I tried to get ahead before the rest of the week.

Tuesday 5th Was another home office day, alas a beautiful warm blue-sky day outside. I got a lot done, but it was heads-down all the way. Late in the day I rode to a new giant home store near us, especially to buy a couple of laundry accessories, but had a look around for a few other needs also. 

At 5pm I had a Skype meeting with a colleague in the UK who was just starting her workday. The meeting ran later than I'd planned and dinner ended up late (and me with a headache). Both boys had track and field training until nearly dinner time on Monday and Tuesday.

Love, love, love these missionary-women retreats!

Wednesday 6th I did some uncharacteristic baking mid-morning (usually I do this on weekends, or, at a pinch, late afternoon). It was in preparation for the Women in Ministry retreat that I left for after lunch, I'd volunteered to take some home-baked goodies for snack times.

After lunch, I met four other ladies at school and I drove us all out to far-western Tokyo for the two-night retreat, about a two-hour drive.

Thursday 7th and Friday 8th Yep, at the retreat. Times of worship, fellowship, eating, resting, and even crafting. On Thursday evening we also go to try out some Scottish highland dancing, a lot like Australian bush dancing.

More blossoms!

I had several retreat highlights:

• great Biblical teaching
• time spent one-on-one with a couple of good listeners telling about the challenges we faced at the end of November, early December last year
• a practical grief workshop
• feeling at home with other missionaries who don't need you to explain much between the lines to "get me"
• Scottish dancing
• worshipping in song and in English
• an enjoyable walk

Of particular note from the Bible teaching was:

• being reminded of the love of God, especially that God dwells in perfect love in the Trinity and his compassion towards us is constant.
• the Father-son relationship between Jesus and the Father is worth exploring in the Bible, it's a strong theme
• ministry is about serving (it's not a badge or a status) and it is just as valid to be called to be a faithful follower of Christ in the midst of the chaos or suffering of life as it is to have a recognised "ministry" role
• 2 Corinthians 4:1 tells us that ministry is a gift of God's mercy—what a remarkable way to view whatever it is that God's calling us to do right now
• there's an ongoing challenge to persevere through hardship and not lose heart 2 Cor. 1:7-12

On Thursday night, I sat for about an hour while the two worship leaders continued to sing after the formal session had finished. I just sat and soaked in the music, sometimes singing, sometimes not. It was a wonderful way to end the day.

Friday 8th Thursday was a rainy, cold day, but Friday was sunny and invited me outside. After lunch we were free to go home, but I asked leave of the six other people riding in my van, to take an hour for a stroll down to the river the retreat centre is located next to. It was a lovely bit of breathing space before diving back into the concrete jungle.

Saturday 9th Didn't end up being the day off that I'd envisioned. I spent the morning doing groceries and at the gym and the afternoon working on urgent office matters. David spent a couple of hours at school supervising a robotics team and then he and our youngest went to an end of wrestling season party.

This was me on the train on Monday morning.
Four people in this photo! Tokyo trains are
wonderful, but are also tiring. I've been on them
at least 1 1/2 hrs each day this week so far.

Sunday 10th This was also busier than I'd hoped. Church in the morning, and, though we're not responsible for anything at the church, Japanese worship still makes me tired. We had lunch with OMF colleagues and also a meeting to plan for a missions prayer meeting we're leading at church this coming Sunday. It was a lovely time together, especially seeing our children, who are very un-alike (they are two lower-elementary girls), interact so well.

Mid-afternoon after we got home we had a short (planned) conversation answering questions from a couple who are applying to come to Japan with OMF. Mostly it was about kids education.

Then we rested.

Monday 11th I jumped on a train not long after 8am to head to our monthly Kanto OMF prayer and fellowship day. I didn't know it, but I wasn't going to return home until nearly lunchtime the next day. Around lunchtime I became unwell. It seems now that I developed a rather nasty headache/stomach migraine. It would have been nice to jump in a car and sleep all the way home, but the idea of spending 90 minutes trains getting home was too much, so I ended up staying the night there, in OMF's guesthome. First time that's ever happened to me: not being able to return home because of illness.

This cuppa helped me get home on Tuesday after
a nasty headache the day before kept me from
travelling the 1 1/2 hrs home on trains.

Tuesday 12th I gingerly returned home and, after a bit of a midday rest, had a great afternoon trying to catch up on computer work that had been neglected for several days.

Wednesday 13th I worked at home in the morning and then met a friend for coffee (about an hour away by train). It was a delightful afternoon, but I have to admit that I'm still struggling under a bit of a headache cloud. Not so bad as Monday, but it's lurking, and sometimes clouding my thinking.

Well, that is already a lot and if I don't publish this soon, you'll just be getting an elaborate version of my daily schedule, which isn't my intention (I started this on Tuesday and now it's Thursday)!

This photo doesn't show well this cute little
building. One room upstairs and one downstairs.
It's a coffee shop. The sort that asks you which
coffee beans you'd like your coffee crafted from!

A week of training in Sapporo

This photo is of the inside of the front doors of OMF's
Hokkaido Centre (language and culture school
plus admin centre) which was built after we
graduated from langauge school.

I'm in Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido—the northernmost main island of Japan. For me, Hokkaido is the place where I started my life in Japan, not the mysterious frozen island in the north that everyone in Japan "would like to visit one day". 

We spent our first 3½ years in Japan here, had our second son here, experienced four winters, and numerous other challenges, including having our son twice hospitalised in his first 14 months of life. So it's a place that can dredge up old, not-so-nice memories. 

But we have also attended numerous OMF conferences here. And have the great memory of doing our first camping-tour on this island (see one of my posts about that trip in 2013 here as we travelled in the northernmost part of the island). This is my second week-long training event up here. The other, though, was six years ago (feels like a life-time ago).

The training event I'm at is an OMF-developed training course called Project Timothy. It is part of a series of four designed to help people learn and grow in themselves and their ministry. This one is especially about gifting and looking at how God has working in and through our past to bring us to where we are now. Today we've been working on a very specific form of a life timeline. It's been rather challenging, but hopefully helpful. (I previously went on one of these courses in February 2016, in Bangkok, the one that focuses on Teams.)

The journey

On Saturday afternoon we finished Thrift Shop and I packed for my Hokkaido trip that evening. I really didn't feel like coming away, but as this was decided months ago, I went ahead, trusting that it was the right thing.

I left soon after church, catching the requisite three trains to get to the airport on the other side of the city. The photo above was the platform at my final change and quite confusing. Thankfully the station has made quite an effort to make sure people got on the right train! And yes, there was some English, or at least romaji rendering here (romaji being the use of roman alphabet to write Japanese).

The journey through the airport and the 1½ hr flight went well and then I met an OMF colleague and we travelled to the Hokkaido OMF guest home together on a bus. All very smooth and not as tiring as I'd expected. And I slept well Sunday night too, though I was a bit twitchy in the evening, being a bit people-worn and sharing a "flat" with three other ladies.

A luxury?

It's always a measure of hard and good to be away from home. I worked very hard the week before last to make sure that I was freed up to work at Thrift Shop last week and then come to this training. It was challenging, but feels good now to know that it's okay that I'm not attending to my usual responsibilities.

This week is a bit of a luxury, really. But possibly a very helpful luxury, to take time away from the usual daily grind to reflect on 40+ years of God working in my life to lead me to where I am today. I'm a reflector by nature, so this just plays to what I enjoy doing anyway!

During lunchtime I took a walk in the neighbourhood and snapped some iPhone photos. Tomorrow my post will be those photos, showing you a snapshot of now in this suburb of Sapporo, as well as some unique things about this city that has a climate unlike anything you find in any Australian city.

My Saturday was edgy

Saturday was a track and field meet, yep, it's started up again and doesn't stop until it's all over now (mid May). It was really good that middle and high school comps were at the same venue, so we were both able to see both our boys! 

The venue is out near Tokyo Bay (40-50km away, depending on whether you take tollroads or not), and the fastest way to get there on a Saturday is by train (not to mention parking...). But it still took 1 ½ hours and four trains. The day promised to be warm-ish (around 17/18C), so we didn't rug up very much. However a nasty cold wind arrived not too long after we did and that made the day a challenge to get through.

Our family was represented in several events: 100m, 200m, 400m, 4x400m, and the 1,500m. We also had an entrant in the middle school discus, but the wind started to move the giant cage surrounding the discus circle and so they cancelled that event. The venue has a lovely tall grandstand, but that wasn't so lovely on Saturday as it caught all the wind. I ended up hiding in one of the rooms at track-level to stay out of the wind, popping out only when my boys were running.

Despite all the discomfort, it was good to be there to watch our boys. They rarely say so, but I choose to believe that they appreciate us being there. Several of their classmates tell their parents not to come and so their parents don't come, and I think that is just sad. As I've written many times before, sports provide us a valuable way to remain connected through these challenging teenage years, so I'm very thankful that they are sporty and that we have the capacity to go and watch them.

I did enjoy pulling out my camera and working to get the setting right, it's added an extra element of fun and challenge to spectating. Got some good action shots too!

By the end of the day, though, I was tired. I really don't like wind, it makes me feel edgy. My eyes were irritated by the wind and all the stuff flying around too (dust and pollen).

At the end of the competition I had to make a decision: go home with David and the team (he drove them team home in the school bus) or take the trains again. I opted for the trains, and I'm glad. It took me half the time that the bus took to get back! I also got more exercise—I took more than 8,000 steps on Saturday, mostly just because I took trains! It also gave me time "alone". I was tired enough that I didn't feel like interacting with people all they way home, so I travelled on my own (in the usual crowds). Amazingly I got a seat on each of the three trains too! Then when I arrived home fully two hours before everyone else, I was able to have a shower and have some relaxing time all on my own. Quite refreshing, really.

Interesting to ponder this from an Australian perspective: it seems to me that is definitely a little on the edge of ordinary to choose to take a train instead of riding in a vehicle and certainly that the train was way faster than the vehicle. But that is life in Tokyo. We choose what mode of transport we will take in the context of where we're going (among other things).

Suitcase on the train

I can't believe it's a month today since I flew back to Japan. It doesn't seem that long.

Someone asked me recently about that trip back, and I realised that I didn't tell you about the last leg of the journey, a very Japanese story.

The airport to our house is about 100km, give or take some. I took the trains. Three trains, to be precise. The last train I hopped on was an express and left at around 9pm. I was pulling a significantly sized suitcase, one of the two that helped move my son to Australia. It weighed 27kg (I brought back some stuff, mostly some new Australian-sized towels).

This station is the end of the line that runs past our place, so the trains usually stand open for five or ten minutes before they leave, while people pile on. I arrived three minutes before it left, so it was already very full, though not so full that people were squished together yet. However, to fit me and my suitcase on, they did have to squish a bit.The trouble was, that when you get on that late, you are in the doorway, and my suitcase is a bit wider than the usual person.

This is the station where I hopped on the express train. You can
see there is a culture of waiting patiently in line. The green "bay"
is for the next train. The orange "bay" is for the one after the
next train!

It was fine, until we hit the first stop and people tried to squeeze past my suitcase. Usually two or three people at a time can get off a Tokyo train, but it was definitely single-file in our doorway. I felt really embarrassed and apologised, while trying in vain to shrink my suitcase into a smaller space. 

Eventually enough room had been freed that I saw my chance to manoeuvre me and my luggage away from the door. It meant running over a few toes and I apologised a bit more. But the bottleneck was instantly released and a dozen or more people flowed out of the train.

Probably a more Tokyo-ite response would have been to get out of the train with my suitcase and let everyone out before re-boarding. People do this all the time. They especially do this if they want to remain near the door for an easy exit in a couple of stations time. It is considered the polite thing to do, rather than make people push past you to get through the door. 

However, I was very tired and trying to manoeuvre a suitcase half my weight in and out of the train just seemed like too much (although it was probably an afterthought rather than a real consideration at the time, me not being a true Tokyo-ite yet).

Did I mention that another thing that people get bothered by (and rightly so in a super crowded train) are backpacks? They are definitely frowned upon as taking up too much room. My regular luggage for plane travel is a significantly sized backpack. But in this regard I did a little better, I removed my backpack and balanced it on top of the suitcase in front of me, minimising my "footprint". However that would have made it more difficult to get out of the train with it all and then back on again...

That was my Tokyo welcome! I'm pleased to say I was welcomed by David at the other end of this journey with a hug and a kiss, and a short ride in our van back home.

Nothing like jumping straight back into Tokyo life. Australia was very quickly washed away as a vague dream. Even now, I'm wondering where most of my February went. I'm usually a bit confused at this time of year anyway, but this year it's worse than usual.

Suitcases and trains are especially on my mind because we have to catch the trains with (admittedly smaller) suitcases as a family on Monday morning in the middle of rush hour as we travel to Hokkaido for our mission conference. I'm advocating leaving earlier and taking the non-express trains as a way to avoid inconveniencing others and getting pinned to our suitcases.

Brisbane trains

So a bit of a different post from my sojourn in Australia. I travelled on the train today and took some photos of things that are a little bit different to Tokyo.

No ticket gates on many stations (i.e. a place you have to swipe your transit card to get through). You have to "level-up" and remember to touch your transit card to a "post" on the platform somewhere (short, yellow pillar in the middle of the photo).

Train stations with park-and-ride car parks, and dedicated drop-off areas. The former I haven't seen in Tokyo and the latter is uncommon. Also, the areas around train stations in Tokyo are generally really built-up, not necessarily so in Brisbane. 

As an aside, this train station seemed to be next to a train workshop and they appeared to be testing the horn of the yellow train you can see in the picture behind the cars. It was LOUD!

Inside a Brisbane train is designed for less people. Most Tokyo trains only have seats lining the sides so a maximum number of people can fit (standing) in the carriage. There are also many more things to hold onto in a Tokyo train, again, because many people ride them standing up.

It's hard to see, but also in this photo is a button next to the door that you have to press in order to open the doors. All the doors open whenever you stop on a Tokyo train—one reason that they are so overheated in winter, because otherwise it would get quite cold inside with all the door opening.

Ah yes, and the big elephant: many, many less lines. I didn't get a photo of the timetable, which reveals how few trains actually run on these few lines. Train travel is not as convenient as Tokyo. You have to be more careful about when you get to the station, so that you aren't waiting 29 minutes for the next train.

I was surprised at how long we stopped for at most stations. In Tokyo you get very little time to hop on or off for most stops.

My weekend

This last weekend I spent about six hours on trains over two days. 

Saturday
I travelled from our western Tokyo home to east of the capital for an OMF gathering that included some long-term missionaries, but mostly foreigners who aren't officially with OMF, but also have a heart for reaching Japanese. Most Our region of OMF has been trying to provide some support and encouragement for such folk and this three-hour worship, fellowship, and discussion time was part of that. I enjoyed it, but it remains true that our headquarters is a long way from home.

Sunday
Then on Sunday I travelled from home to Yokohama, south of Tokyo. This was an equally long journey. Just like Saturday, it involved three of four trains and about one and a half hours.

We met our friend at the train station nearest where the
church was meeting and we found an attractive little
pizza restaurant nearby. This is the salad that came
with the pizza. Minimalist, but tasty.

I took a friend to Yokohama and we met another friend who lives down there for lunch, Bible study, and then church at 2.15. We joined with a small OMF church plant for their worship time. 

My intention was to introduce our friend, who's moved to Yokohama, to a church down there. It was also a good thing to do. It's not very often that we get to see what other OMF colleagues are doing. Seeing a young church plant reminded me to pray for our colleagues even more. It's tough, slow work in Japan!

Consequences
I was pretty tired at the end of the weekend. But I'd been fairly tired to start the weekend. I've been dodging illness-bullets for some time now, but obviously not taking time-off over the weekend was all that was needed to end my winning streak and I ended up at the doctor with an infection yesterday afternoon. I was pretty wiped out from lunch on. Thankfully it's an easy-to-treat infection and I'm already feeling better.

I'm thankful too that my job is fairly flexible and it isn't usually too hard to take things easy if I need to. The trick that I haven't yet found is how to avoid these situations altogether. I don't think I'm terrible at managing my time, but somehow I get over busy and I periodically get physical reminders like this, that I need to take some time to rest.. Probably it's a great blessing that these are relatively small things, gauges to help me see when I'm getting too worn out.

At this point I'm looking forward to our holidays. We're going away for a while in July. The rest is much needed and much anticipated. For three of the nights we'll be camping at Lake Tazawa (check out the lakeside campsite) towards the north of this island, with other venues planned either side of that. I'm looking forward to new experiences and stepping away from most of my responsibilities for a bit.

Last night's fancy do

This and the next photo were taken by Ush Sawada, the CAJ photographer.
It was such a privilege to have a professional to help capture the memories.

Last night we attended the banquet that I've been helping organise (since September last year). You can go back and see my post about the initial meeting here where I volunteered to write an email.

Alas it ballooned into much more than a simple email. As of now I have received at least 442 emails related to this and the two other parent-organised events we have going in these few weeks. And I haven't counted the hundreds that I've written, not to mention phone calls and just a few meetings. 

We struggled to find a venue in Tokyo that would hold us all (about 142 people)
 at the budget that we set. But thanks to one Japanese mum we found this
venue on the top floor of a downtown hotel and were able to negotiate
with the staff through her.
Isn't the room lovely? (Photo by Ush Sawada)

In that post in September I wrote "We have cross-cultural issues." We certainly did. We still did last night. But I'm not going to dwell on that because barring one problem, we had a wonderful night in a gorgeous venue with many willing volunteers who helped everything run smoothly. I think the night was enjoyed by the majority of those who attended.

A long escalator as we travelled down to the subway
for one of the three trains on our way home. Though
travelling this way wasn't odd, it was a little odd doing
it dressed up for a banquet. Thankfully I didn't have to
wear heels.

But I am thankful to have it over. As you can imagine a lot of preparation goes into something like this and the cross-cultural, bilingual team added to the challenges. My co-coordinator and I tried to stick by the principle of KIS (Keep it Simple), which meant we tried to keep extra fuss (and meetings) to a minimum. Unfortunately last night my head was mostly taken up with answering people's questions (which were important questions, and someone has to deal with that) and so I didn't have enough personal-social energy left in me to socialise as I usually do at events like this.

I'm thankful too, to my parents who were able to stay at home with our younger two boys (they watched State of Origin football, an important three-game annual series in our home state). It's interesting having overseas visitors stay, you see that what we've become used to is not "normal" to an Aussie. For example, that we travelled by train to this event, in fact we travelled on six trains. This is not abnormal to us anymore, but it was a new thought for our visitors.

Today's a bit quiet, but then tomorrow night is the main event: the graduation ceremony. Thankfully I have almost no responsibilities beyond being a mum (and daughter) tomorrow night.